[Dancer-users] Need help in understanding the role of taint handling in Dancer

[Flavio Poletti]

Would you produce a minimal test script that exposes the problem?

Cheers,

    Flavio.


On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 9:41 PM, Gurunandan Bhat <gbhat at pobox.com> wrote:

> Thanks Flavio.
>
>
>    1. The input string for encryption is byte-level identical in both
>    cases. I have used unpack to look at the input string in both cases to
>    confirm this. I have run a large number of tests.
>     2. I have used the regular expression trick to untaint (just in case)
>    in my own code. In addition, I am using Data::FormValidator to validate the
>    input strings so I guess it uses a regexp check in any case. For good
>    measure I have passed the option untaint_all_constraints => 1 to DFV just in
>    case.
>    3. There is something in the Dancer runtime environment that makes
>    Crypt::OpenSSL::RSA do the wrong thing. If it is not taint and it is not
>    encoding (which I have confirmed) - what could it be? If I knew this I could
>    pass it on to the Crypt::OpenSSL::RSA guys so that they can fix whatever it
>    is thats going wrong there.
>
>
> Thanks once again for your time and your attention
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 12:18 PM, Flavio Poletti <polettix at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> I would be surprised if taint is the cause of your pain. From what I know:
>>
>> * you are the sole responsible for activating taint mode. It has to be set
>> in the hash-bang and possibly provided on the command line;
>> * when taint kicks in something like "die()" happens, so you should be
>> pretty aware of it (unless you wrap it all with eval() and throw away any
>> error).
>>
>> You can try your command-line script with taint mode turned on by means of
>> the "-T" command-line switch (see perldoc perlrun for details). If you want
>> to try and untaint the input string for the password, you have to use a
>> regular expression:
>>
>> my ($untainted_password) = $tainted_password =~ /(.*)/;
>>
>> Note that the "blind untaint" method above is frowned upon, tainting is
>> all about forcing you (the programmer) to carefully check your inputs so you
>> should try to figure out the correct way to validate the input. In this case
>> I think that we can assume that any character is valid for a password, so
>> the whole string is good.
>>
>>
>> One thing I'd look at is encoding. I'd try to see whether, in the two
>> different contexts, the two password:
>>
>> 1. have the same encoding status (use utf8::is_utf8() for this, see
>> perldoc utf8)
>> 2. are exactly the same (in this case I'd use something like
>>
>>    warning unpack 'H*', $password;
>>
>> in order to see the raw bytes in hex).
>>
>> Good luck,
>>
>>     Flavio.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 8:20 PM, Gurunandan Bhat <gbhat at pobox.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I am in the process of writing a Dancer application that does (in part)
>>> some heavy lifting of PKI (RSA) [en|de]cryption using Crypt::OpenSSL::RSA
>>> and a few other Crypt::* modules and have been hit with an issue that I do
>>> not fully understand. Here is a rough sequence of what happens:
>>>
>>>
>>>    1. I have written a Moose based class that does PKI stuff. One of the
>>>    the methods in this class is encrypting binary strings using a Public Key.
>>>    The Public Key is read from a file on disk.
>>>    2. When I run a test script with this class, the encryption works
>>>    fine.
>>>    3. When I run the same script as a route handler in Dancer the
>>>    encryption silently produces the wrong result - decrypting it does not give
>>>    me the original string.
>>>    4. Testing is a bit hard and complicated due to the fact that RSA
>>>    encryption is not deterministic and encrypting the same string twice will
>>>    give wildly different strings but decrypting both should correctly give the
>>>    original string. However after a few days of trying out multiple test code -
>>>    I am reasonably certain that *encryption with Crypt::OpenSSL::RSA
>>>    gives the correct result from the command line but gives the wrong result
>>>    when run as a Dance route handler*.I am currently working around this
>>>    by doing the encryption through a script on disk which the route handler
>>>    runs - but this is obviously too silly for words.
>>>
>>> The only thing I can attribute this to is that my input string collected
>>> from a form and/or my public key object which I read from file are marked as
>>> tainted in Dancer but not in a command line script and that
>>> Crypt::OpenSSL::RSA has a bug when used with tainted variables. This is a
>>> conjecture but the only one that seems likely given the large amount of
>>> testing that I have done.
>>>
>>> With this background here are a couple of questions that I have:
>>>
>>>
>>>    1. Does Dancer taint input variables received from the user(-form)?
>>>    2. If yes, how do I untaint it.
>>>    3. How can I conclusively confirm that taintedness is causing the
>>>    difference in output between the command line script and the route handler.
>>>    With identical inputs to my command line script and to my route handler I am
>>>    certain that there is a difference in output. I am wondering if taintedness
>>>    is the cause.
>>>
>>> Thank you for your patience in reading this rather long message
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Dancer-users mailing list
>>> Dancer-users at perldancer.org
>>> http://www.backup-manager.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/dancer-users
>>>
>>>
>>
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>
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